Archive for 2014

Happy Holidays

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Wed, 12/24/2014 - 17:05

Tags: Other

Winter Holidays

Season's Greetings and Best Wishes for 2015!

How Small?

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Wed, 09/24/2014 - 19:42

Tags: Electronics, Embedded, GPS, Hardware

As some of you may know, we at WRD Systems have been working on our new, next gen, GPS tracker. The goal of this one is to be as small as possible, yet pack as many features as possible out of the box while keeping the cost low. We often get requests asking how small our tracker is. We tried communicating scale in millimeter, or took a picture of the board next to a coin, but they did not seem to convey how small our tracker can really be. To try to improve on this, we present the Matchbox Tracker:

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Autumn

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Sun, 09/14/2014 - 01:02

Tags: Other

One of the good things about autumn in Finland is that it gets dark again, while not being too cold yet. This allows one to go outside in the middle of the night and do some stargazing without freezing within a few minutes. In addition, solar activity has been high in the past few days, which leads to some wonderful aurora displays. While I did not manage to capture the aurora this time, I did take a picture of the moon which you can see here below. 

Moon

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On Processes and Threads

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Tue, 07/01/2014 - 02:05

Tags: C, Computer Architecture, Linux, Programming

Some time ago I followed an interesting discussion on a board where people were discussing multi-core software development. During the course of the discussion it became apparent that there is a lot of confusion and misconceptions about a 'process' and a 'thread' as they exist on e.g., a Linux system. Both are applicable to make use of multi-core systems, but they do so in different ways. Even though the exact distinction while compared to early definitions of the terms has perhaps become somewhat blurred, the two remain separate entities which can complement each other perfectly. In this post I'm going to try and illustrate the similarities and differences, and show you some real life scenarios of both. Keep in mind that we will be making some generalizations - and there are lots of examples where these generalizations do not directly apply, or where there are other possible implementations of the cited examples. Going into these would turn this blog entry into an entire book...

Multiprocess

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Kickstarter - Part Deux

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Thu, 02/20/2014 - 00:35

Tags: Embedded, GPS, Programming

In the spirit of "never give up, never surrender", we're back with a Kickstarter project! Just like the previous one, it has to do with GPS and location, but this time we focus on a particular application: bike security and tracking. We're doing this project in partnership with Cycling Boom.

 

 

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New Horizons for Embedded

Submitted by PurpleAlien on Sat, 01/18/2014 - 01:56

Tags: Computer, Embedded, Programming, School

Well, maybe not that new - but definitely something that is getting more and more important. 

The embedded development toolbox is rapidly expanding, and it is becoming harder and harder to find people skilled in these tools. Starting from the university, 'embedded' is considered hard and not as 'cool' as traditional software development. Why spend hours hacking away and reading datasheet to get to blink a LED and send 'hello world' over a UART when you could build rich graphical programs with web technologies or mobile? The fact that embedded development requires a wide skill set going from electronics, process control, signal processing to software, to Matlab means that substantial time is required to form a good base on which to build the required specialized skill sets. Not many people are willing to do that. 

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